Approximately Half of Total Protein Intake by Adults Must Be Animal-Based
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Edit: Reading the full paper itself, it seems to be the case. They explicitly add "excluding the use of nutritional supplements or fortified foods." - very silly and misleading.
Doubly so given their actual conclusion (not listed in the abstract): "...would necessarily require food fortification and/or nutrient supplementation to cover adult nutritional requirement". So they acknowledge their title is basically a lie.
(As a side note their math/calculations also look very "I made this up and this has numbers" vs. a serious statistical analysis but that's really not the main point here)
Let's not start replacing normal nutrition by pills if we can.
My critique was about how they claim one thing (You need 50% of your protein to come from meat) but don't show it and instead show that if you don't take supplements you need to do that which is a _completely different claim_. The silly bit isn't that supplements are needed for a balanced plant-based diet it's that this piece is silly and the point it _actually_ makes isn't news.
People supplement their diets all the time - babies get Vitamin D3 drops and iron drops. Mothers take folic acid during pregnancy. Would they die otherwise? Usually not, but supplementing your diet according to medical advice to avoid things like neurological defects is generally a good idea.
My sleep mechanisms are night and day (no pun intended) because of this single supplement.
You can't "count" protein in the same way that you can count carbohydrates or sugar or calories. This is because protein is much more complex and different types of protein vary in type of amino acids and your ability to digest it.
Thus quality of the protein varies significantly by it's source.
So 50 grams of protein from a hamburger is not equivalent to 50 grams of protein from a bean-based burger. Depending on the exact mixture of components and how it's prepared you might need to eat 250 grams of "fake meat" to match the 50 grams of beef protein.
Even in the USA most people don't meet minimum intake requirements for proteins. And it's very difficult for vegans to meet the minimal requirements.
It is possible, but it requires a mixture of different types of plant proteins to supplement each other and improve digestibility. But it's not a simple thing you can do by accident and very few people are aware of the disparities. You can even make things worse by mixing things badly.
I don't know all the details as I've only become recently aware of this stuff...
For gauging the quality of protein they have developed the DIAAS method to indicate protein quality. The old scale was PDCAAS, which some older dietary guidelines are based off of. However PDCAAS didn't take into account the digestibility of the protein, which lead to misleading suggestions.
A sub 50 gram fortified plant based burger could be in theory be more ideal than a 50 gram hamburger. However in practice hitting the perfect mix of amino acids at every meal or even on average isn’t needed, you can eat beans for lunch and rice for dinner and reach a complete surplus over the day.
Of course nutrition goes beyond protein, if you only eat hamburgers protein is fine but you run into other issues. A varied diet it critical, but it really doesn’t need to include meat.
This is not true, almost the whole population in the US reaches the minimum intake requirements. If you are making claims like this, you should source them with some sources
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29786804/
> There is a widespread myth that we have to be careful about what we eat so that we do not cause protein deficiency. We know today that it is virtually impossible to design a calorie-sufficient diet, whether it is based on meat, fish, eggs, various vegetarian diets or even unprocessed whole natural plant foods, which is lacking in protein and any of the amino acids.
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/pr...
> Protein deficiency is almost unheard of in the United States. It’s easy to get all the protein you need without eating meat, dairy, or eggs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein...
> Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of protein throughout the day from foods like beans, legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains.
It is neither: they were trying to control variables. The question is: if someone wanted to reduce/eliminate animal-based protein sources, how far could one go?
Most people 'just want to eat' and not worry all the chemicals in food and their levels. If moving away from animal protein is going to be recommended to people (for health, ethical, environmental, etc, reasons), how far is it possible to go before having to tell people to take supplements. From the study:
> Our results therefore imply that moving towards diets with lower animal protein contributions or to a fully vegan diet as the ones included within the range of diets recommended by the Eat Lancet commission (21) would necessarily require food fortification and/or nutrient supplementation to cover adult nutritional requirements. The minimum percentages of animal proteins found in the present study to being compatible with nutrient adequacy in the different subpopulations considered can be compared to those obtained in two recent studies focused on designing sustainable diets for French adults from the Nutrinet-Santé cohort (24) and for older Dutch adults from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam cohort (25), respectively.
Per the study, currently about (on average) 70% of protein is animal-based; depending on the demographic, that can be reduced to 45-60%.
The silly part was the misleading title/abstract - the reason I was pointing to the (obvious and well established) conclusion of "people who don't eat meat need to supplement their diet with fortified foods or pills" is the claim "Approximately Half of Total Protein Intake by Adults Must Be Animal-Based".
Make of that what you will!
A reasonable wondering, it seems.
That doesn't invalidate the data, but it does raise questions about how the researchers might frame the experiment or interpret or present the results (such as a click bait title). Then, of course, there's always the possibility of a modicum of cultural bias...
Personally, I'm going to stick with my almost vegetarian diet (I probably average 2 servings of meat a month, at most, but get most of my protein requirements from eggs and cheese, while the bulk of calories come from grain, vegetables, fruits and nuts). To me the reason to cut back on animal products isn't nutrition, or health (moderate animal product consumption is clearly not a big health negative), but environmental and ethical: the way most meat, especially, but also dairy and eggs, is produced is environmentally unsustainable, and ethically abhorrent.
Imagine a smoking study funded by big tobacco that defines its own safe tar and nicotine levels and then determines if we’re within those thresholds.
In the intro they even say for western country it food source would not matter because we're above minimum protein intake.
Very misleading, not sure how this title passed the bulshit test.
If tofu and beans supply adequate nutrition but cost $1 more per week than meat, the study design would conclude you "must" eat meat.
My contempt is for the "people should just spend more money" crowd.
Aren't there whole populations where people live without meat for cultural reasons? Like many regions in Asia, especially India? How do those survive till today?
> This study provides factual information about the animal protein contribution to total proteins compatible with meeting all nutrient-based recommendations at no additional cost and shows that it varies between 45% and 60% depending on the group of adults considered.
TL;DR, if you replace animal protein with non-animal protein, you're probably losing out on other nutrients. Also:
> In Model Set#2, for women and men over 65 years (C and E), decreasing animal protein contribution to total proteins below 55% and 60% respectively led to protein levels below recommend levels.
This suggests that non-animal proteins are not used by the body as efficiently as animal proteins.
I don't think this means your protein must by animal-based, but if you're substituting vegan options, you probably need more protein than you think, and also need additional vitamin supplements, as well.